MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Aug. 26, 2015 –ZeroStack, a new cloud computing company, came out of stealth today to introduce a private cloud solution that is easier to configure, consume and manage than any other technology on the market.

ZeroStack offers the best of both private and public clouds in a single solution that combines on-premises deployment and a SaaS platform – allowing customers to consume a self-service cloud without significant in-house expertise or time.

This unique combination significantly reduces the time and complexity of deploying and running private clouds – with 40-60 percent lower cost of ownership than existing solutions.

The private cloud market is one of the fastest growing areas in enterprise IT infrastructure with 40 to 50 percent CAGR. Many organizations are choosing private clouds over public clouds because of security concerns, regulatory factors, performance, visibility, data gravity or other reasons where an internally hosted cloud simply better suits their needs.

However, the lack of an all-in-one private cloud solution has forced enterprises to piece together complex software stacks with hardware and face higher operational costs to manage it all.

For the first time, organizations can set up a hyper-converged, scale-out private cloud infrastructure in less than 30 minutes, designed to grow with their needs through self-healing, cloud-based management, monitoring, analytics, capacity planning and chargeback – available with open APIs.

ZeroStack Opens the Next Chapter in the Private Cloud Evolution

ZeroStack is led by a seasoned team with decades of experience in building enterprise systems. Co-founder and CEO Ajay Gulati was senior architect and R&D lead at VMware, where he designed products including Storage I/O control and Storage DRS. Co-founder and CTO Kiran Bondalapati was founding engineer at Bromium, where he architected the company’s security solution based on new techniques with hardware virtualization, and was a technical leader at AMD, where he developed the underpinnings of several virtualization technologies.

“Private clouds are an essential element of many organizations’ IT strategies, but they have been frustrated by the complexity, slow time to value and cost of deploying and running them,” said Ajay Gulati, co-founder and CEO of ZeroStack. “ZeroStack was founded on the belief that every enterprise should be able to stand up a private cloud without having to stitch together complex software and hardware or rely on expensive technical teams to run it. A private cloud should be as easy to consume as a public cloud.”

ZeroStack also disclosed $5.6 million in Series A funding led by Foundation Capital in 2014, with Ashu Garg, general partner, leading the investment from Foundation Capital and joining as the first board member. Mark Leslie, founder and CEO and Veritas, has also been appointed to the board.

“ZeroStack is the future of enterprise infrastructure,” said Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital. “ZeroStack finally brings AWS-like cloud infrastructure within reach of enterprise IT, and we are looking forward to working with the team as they disrupt the market.”

ZeroStack is targeting customers in the technology sector and vertical industries including education, pharmaceuticals, biotech, oil and gas, media, retail and state and local government. Early users report outstanding benefits from The ZeroStack Cloud Platform.

About The ZeroStack Cloud Platform

The ZeroStack solution is built on OpenStack and consists of the ZS1000 hyper-converged system and the ZeroStack SaaS platform. The ZS1000 series is a symmetric building block for the cloud that consists of compute, storage, networking and management software. Customers can start with a single node highly available private cloud and add capacity on demand.

The on-premises cloud built using ZS1000 is configured, consumed, and managed using the ZeroStack SaaS platform. The ZeroStack SaaS platform enables self service, rapid addition of features without forklift upgrades, multi-site deployments and zero touch operations.

“ZeroStack has allowed us to easily deploy a self-service cloud for our engineering team which provides us the ability to quickly spin-up, develop, and test the complex applications we build.” — Doug Junkins, SVP and CTO at NTT Innovation Institute, Inc.

“With ZeroStack we are able to get a complete cloud solution with amazing price to performance ratio. ZeroStack helps us reduce the number of licenses we have to deal with. These guys have really thought about problems faced by enterprise IT.” — Richard Moon, Senior Director of Worldwide Operations and Corporate IT at CollabNet, Inc.

“ZeroStack has combined the benefits of public and private clouds using a refreshingly simple architecture. Every CIO should evaluate the ZeroStack offering before embarking on their infrastructure journey to cloud.” — Mark Leslie, managing general partner, Leslie Ventures and former founder, chairman and CEO of Veritas Software.

“Zerostack brings public cloud like manageability to private clouds. Customers can continue to enjoy the better experience and security offered by private clouds without worrying about hiring an army of experts to manage them.” — Mohit Aron, founder and CEO of Cohesity

“Based on years of productive collaboration and innovation at VMware, I know Ajay is an outstanding computer scientist and an insightful leader. The ZeroStack story is compelling and it was a no-brainer to invest in such a talented team.” –– Carl Waldspurger, former principal engineer at VMware

“ZeroStack has built a fundamentally superior architecture for deploying and managing clouds. This will change the way data center architects perceive complexity, cost and effort needed to move from traditional IT to a cloud-based model.” — Mike Dvorkin, co-founder of Insieme Networks

“ZeroStack provides a very elegant model of deploying and consuming clouds for companies that do not have the expertise, time or scale to build it themselves. I invested in ZeroStack because I have worked with Ajay Gulati before and know him to be a deep thinker and a great technologist.” — Umesh Maheshwari, co-founder and CTO of Nimble Storage

About ZeroStack

ZeroStack delivers the industry’s first complete, scale-out private cloud that converges compute, storage, networking and management services. With ZeroStack, customers can drastically reduce time to value for IT, and lower software, hardware and operational costs. Founded by Kiran Bondalapati, founding engineer at Bromium, and Ajay Gulati, who was senior architect and R&D lead at VMware, ZeroStack was built by a veteran team of cloud experts. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley and funded by investors including Foundation Capital. For more information, visit www.zerostack.com.